Cinema Stories

The movie we watched in class L'Atalante by Jean Vigo introduced the concept of poetic realism within film.  In an article by the website Film Forever , the writer explains how Vigo executed this idea.  Overall, he mixed realist and surrealist aspects in the film to create the transition into poetic realism of the 1930s. In the beginning of the movie, a couple is getting married and the audience sees the raw emotions of the bride as she must leave the village she grew up in.  While presenting the audience with a realistic situation, the special effects of the following scene create a surrealist viewpoint.  For example, when she walks along the steam boat, she appears ghostlike, floating in the steam melancholically. The author of the article also writes that within the film, the actors begin acting naturalistically, meaning they do not appear to just be reading from a script. The author also writes that the theme of working class or luckless heroes experiencing ...

https://whitecitycinema.com/2012/05/18/lets-talk-about-poetic-realism/ This is an interview with a professor and explains a lot about Poetic Realism. It's of course a movement in french cinema, but more specifically it deals with problems of love and hardship. One thing I did not realize before this interview was that it was heavily influenced by french painting such as Impressionism and Surrealism. It even mentions the film we saw a clip from in class- L'atalante. It mentions this being a good example of the contradictory nature of poetic realism because it features working class characters

This week in class, we watched the beginning of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934). In this movie, following in the style of Poetic Realism, the audience is privy to an unconventional way of life, along with all the grit that can accompany such a life. Jean Vigo's films often animated a feeling of anti-establishment in an urban city/realist background, and favored the side of the weak/powerless; in class, we discussed this along with a brief discussion on Vigo's use of depth of field and in-camera editing, with such, decisions of focus are made by the camera. For this week's blog, I have found an interview, from 1968, between Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante . This interview is interesting as it shows the impact Vigo had on Truffaut as a film maker. In the interview, Truffaut communicates how he saw  L'Atalante at a young age and it deeply resonated with him as a child with a keen sense of reality; Truffaut goes on to say how Vig...

         The way in which a camera is positioned creates various types of meaning throughout a film. Typically a high angle cast towards a character creates the sense that he or she should appear weak, while a low angle creates a powerful, dominant character.  In an article by Film Forever  film critic Alex Barrett explains how certain angles and film techniques play an important role in The Passion of Joan of Arc .      Barrett points out that the close up shot is one of the most important aspects of the film.  It creates drama and also shows the emotion of Falconetti. The close ups establish a specific sense of space during the film to illustrate the placement of characters within scenes.  For example, when the priest places the wafer in Joan's mouth, his hand enters from her left, showing that he is next to her. In addition, Barrett writes about the lack of direct eye contact made throughout the film. When Joan looks in...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/movies/the-passion-of-joan-of-arc-new-digital-restoration-film-forum.html          This article from The New York Times is particularly interesting in its explanation of the Passion of Joan of Arc. It of course goes over the main actress' performance, but also gives background information that could change one's perspective on the film. For example, Falconetti was known at the time for playing light, romantic roles. This makes her performance all the more impressive. The article also does a good job of situating it within its era and comparing it to other films. One such comparison is to Battleship Potemkin. Another interesting fact from this article was that the scenes were shot in order. Obviously, this is contrary to the norm in cinema. It was clearly a deliberate choice by Dreyer. One might guess that it was part of the process of bringing out the most from the actors in the film. Dreyer's treatment of Falconetti wasn't ...

In class this week we discussed the "Kuleshov effect"; the namesake for this film theory being Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who carried out this film experiment in 1921. The Kuleshov effect is when two images are juxtaposed together and create a new meaning that didn't photographically exist in the images prior to editing. Since class this week, I find that I have been looking for the Kuleshov effect in much of what I watch on a daily basis; I have found that the Kuleshov effect is everywhere and it is interesting to be able to discern this effect and become aware of when I am being cinematically manipulated. For my document this week, I have found a clip from an interview in 1964, part of the CBC television series  Telescope , with Alfred Hitchcock. In the minute-long clip, Hitchcock breaks down the mechanics of the Kuleshov effect and explains its influence on the viewer.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNVf1N34-io

On April 21st 1895, Woodville Latham, and his two sons Otway and Gray, first demonstrated their "Panopticon" (later renamed Eidoloscope) film projector; this was the first ever film projector in the United States. Up until this time, the U.S. populous had only ever been exposed to Edison's Kinetoscope; with the Kinetoscope, films could only be viewed one-viewer-at-a-time through "peep-show" style boxes. The Latham's are also credited with the invention of the Latham Loop; a loop placed in the film strip that enabled the film to gently wind over from back to front; allowing for longer sequences of film to be projected smoothly. As we learned in class last week, the Lumière Brothers also first debuted their first film projector to audiences in France in 1895; this film projector was named the "Cinematographe". I find the close proximity of these two innovations very intriguing and wonder what these two film engineering contemporary families ...

     Just like the Lumiere brothers, American inventors wanted to explore the idea of the moving image.  One of the first instances of capturing movement occurred in 1872 in Palo Alto, California when Eadweard Mubridge took a series of photographs of a trotting horse.  He had been commissioned by the governor of California at the time, Leland Standford, to complete photographic studies about racing horses. Standford wanted to conclude the debate of whether all four hooves of horses left the ground when they ran.  These photographs, which were combined to form a video, showed that horses did in fact leave the ground completely.      The Lumiere brothers shot their films in a very similar way to Mubridge.  With only the early advancements of film, all of their experiments show a straight, eye level angle onscreen.  It is interesting to see the similar cross over between both inventors in their attempt to create motion pictures. ...

     Here we see a crew of people building the set for Georges Méliès. This gives an idea to its size and to the all the time and dedication it took to make his films. This studio is particularly important because it is the first of its kind. He had an ingenious idea to include walls of glass like a greenhouse in order to let in enough light from the outside. Looking at the films of Méliès it's easy now to overlook all the work that went into them and how ahead they were for the time. However, for the time these films were truly extraordinary. It should also be noted that while Georges Méliès takes credit for the films that anything of that kind of magnitude takes more than one person. His vision needed many other people to help create it and make it a reality, such as the people shown here in this photograph. This tendency to attribute the entire success of something to one person happens often in film, but it is truly a collaborative process. It is also interesting t...